Our video catalog has grown to a size where tags will prove extremely useful. Tagging on Hulu is quick and easy. On each video or show page on our site, you’ll find a list of tags near the bottom of the main page or in the Tags tab to the right of the Discussions tab. Simply check the box next to any tags you think are appropriate to that video or show, or use the Add Tags entry box to add your own.

Click on any tag or enter a term such as “comedy” in the “Search with tags” box to discover other videos with that tag on Hulu. Narrow your search results by adding related tags — for instance, add “satire” to your comedy tag search to find videos tagged both “comedy and satire“.

Click on Your Tags to see all videos that you’ve tagged. Filter the list of all your tagged videos by selecting one or more of your tags listed in the left column. Using this feature you can create custom collections of videos.

One last note: while the beauty of tags is that there are no rules, we do have a preference for separating first and last names with a space, like “tina fey” instead of “tinafey”. That has to do with how we see people searching for names, though again, it’s not a requirement. We’ll also filter out any profanity and normalize your tags to lower case.

That’s it. Tag away! And do send any feedback our way — we’d love to hear from you.

Varun Narang (varun@hulu.com)
Product Manager

You can find this page, which we’re calling “Coming Soon,” when you follow the “Browse by Date” link at the top of Hulu.com and then click on the “Coming Soon” tab. The schedule will consist of scripted currents from ABC, NBC and FOX, including such as favorites as Family Guy, FlashForward, The Cleveland Show, The Office, Bones, Fringe, Modern Family and more. We are hoping to add additional series to the list over time so you can keep up with your favorites.

Along with the schedule, there are a few new features that will help you manage your Hulu viewing. If you’re a registered user, you can request an email notification to alert you when a particular video has been added to Hulu.com. We’ll also alert you on the rare occasion when that video is late in getting up on Hulu.com. For bloggers and editors, you can also grab the code to pre-embed the video to your blog. (An example is pasted below.) We will swap in the video as soon as it’s available on our site, so you’re free to post your article on your own schedule.

Again, thanks for sending us all of your feedback about the site, and we encourage you to send your comments about Coming Soon to feedback@hulu.com. We hope you find this feature helpful — I know it’s definitely something I’m going to use.

Cheers,
Betina Chan-Martin (betina@hulu.com)
User Feedback Evangelist

Hulu Desktop for Linux
Since launching Hulu Desktop, we’ve read thousands of comments about the product. Among all the suggestions, there was one that far outnumbered all the others: our users wanted Linux support.

So while we were tweaking the user interface, adding a few keyboard shortcuts and fixing bugs on Hulu Desktop, we were also working on Linux support. Part of our commitment to help everyone enjoy content, after all, is to provide support to all three major computer operating systems. Hulu Desktop for Linux is compatible with both Ubuntu and Fedora distributions, and will support input from hundreds of infrared remote controls. (See the FAQ for more details.)

If you’re a Linux user and want to check out Hulu Desktop for Linux, you can get started here. Since this product is still in Beta, we encourage your feedback. Jump on our discussion boards to share your ideas, make requests and report any bugs to the Hulu Desktop team.

Hulu Publisher Tools
Designed for bloggers, site editors and webmasters, Hulu Publisher Tools makes it easy to browse and discover premium videos — from Hulu and other sites — to embed in articles and blog posts. In addition to content featured by the Hulu team, our publishing tool features a comprehensive directory that offers the opportunity to preview videos and copy embed codes from a single page. Editors can also create custom playlists for Video Panels that can embed multiple Hulu videos in a single unit.

A search bar lets you type in any keyword — “obama,” for instance — and we’ll call up all the relevant videos pulled by our web crawler. You can select a few clips that look good to you, preview them if you like, and copy the embed codes. And if all the content is from Hulu, you can put together a Video Panel in seconds and embed it on your blog, like I’ve done below with some recent clips from Modern Family.

Go to our Labs section to get started with Hulu Publisher Tools, and we always welcome your feedback via the discussion boards or by email feedback@hulu.com.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Even in that time, the demand for marathon sessions of viewing existed. It just wasn’t easy. Sometime in the second season of The X-Files, I caught an episode on TV, loved it, and wondered how I could catch up on all the episodes I’d missed. The show hadn’t been syndicated and DVDs hadn’t been invented yet.

The Internet had, though, and so I went onto an X-Files newsgroup, explained my situation, and offered to pay to ship a whole series of blank VHS tapes to any fan willing to dub the first season and mail the tapes back to me. To my surprise, someone accepted, and a few weeks later, a huge box arrived in the mail. I spent an entire weekend locked in my room, curtains drawn, watching some 30 episodes of The X-Files back to back.

Soon after, DVDs and then DVRs hit the market, and, perhaps not coincidentally, studios started to issue TV series with long, serial plotlines that required that you to start from the beginning and keep up with multiple story threads, all intertwined. A TV series like 24 or Lost, with its complex plotlines, is more difficult to imagine in the age before DVD box sets, DVR subscriptions and Internet episode guides.

This trip through days of TV viewing past is a long way of introducing Continuous Play, a new feature we’ve added to Hulu today. Even in the on-demand world of online viewing, we see plenty of binge viewing as people work their way through multiple episodes in a session. Continuous Play makes this easier.

Though it’s a new feature, it’s built off some logic that already exists on our site. As you play a video from your queue, for example, we will pause for a moment when the video reaches its endpoint, and then move on to play the next video in your queue, automatically. Continuous Play expands this logic outside of the queue.

Now on every video player on our site, you’ll see a new Continuous Play bar under the video player. On the far right is a dropdown that shows what playlist of videos Continuous Play is working from. For now, there are three primary types of playlists. One is Your Queue, mentioned earlier. The next class is Collections, which have always been part of our site, but which now play continuously. The last type of playlist is more of whichever title you’re watching. If you’re watching a bit from Saturday Night Live, the playlist will be “Saturday Night Live” and will play more sketches from SNL in sequential order. If you’re watching an episode of 30 Rock, Continuous Play will play more episodes of 30 Rock in sequential order.

Just to the left of the dropdown is the On/Off switch for Continuous Play which does just what is says it does. If you click on a video from Your Queue, Continuous Play will turn on, and your queue will play one video after another, just as it always has. Select a group of videos from our Collections page, and Continuous Play will also turn on. Anywhere else on the site, we’ve left Continuous Play off by default. If you visit Hulu from the same computer, we’ll retain the on/off state of Continuous Play from one session to the next.

On the far left of our video panel, you’ll find the “next video” button. Clicking it will send you to the next video in the playlist. Hovering over the “next video” button will show the title of the next video to the right of the button, but if you want a visual view of the next videos in the playlist, click the “show playlist” button below the dropdown and a carousel will drop down, allowing you to browse the playlist and jump ahead to another video if you’d like.

Continuous Play controls carry over to full screen and pop-out modes as well. Give it a try and let us know what you think. If you’re looking for a suggestion as to where to start, try Lost. We have the first four seasons. Start with the Pilot episode, turn on continuous play, and some 84 episodes and roughly 62 hours later, you’ll have a good idea of how Continuous Play works (though you may have a lot of questions about smoke monsters, time travel and the nature of fate).

Eugene Wei
VP of Product
eugene.wei@hulu.com

P.S.: The title of my blog post is a reference to the novel by David Foster Wallace, which I finished recently as part of the recent Infinite Summer book group. In the book, Wallace writes about a film so entertaining that viewers lose all desire to do anything except watch the film again and again. I can’t help but think of that fictional film whenever I hear of someone who stayed up all night watching an entire season of a TV show.

To mark the onset of fall’s TV season, Hulu has just released some new Facebook applications that allow you to tune in to some of your favorite shows and share your thoughts with other Facebook users as you watch. The Hulu: Watch Now Fall Premieres app offers all of Hulu’s fall premieres — including shows from NBC, Fox and ABC — for streaming on Facebook as soon as they are posted to Hulu. And what’s Facebook without a status update or two? You can post real-time updates as you watch, sharing them with your friends and others via the Hulu: Watch Now activity feed.

If you’re a fan of specific shows, you may want to check out the Hulu: Watch Now apps for shows like The Office, Fringe, House, Family Guy, Heroes and more. You can bookmark these pages and come back to them to see fresh content throughout the TV season.

Also on the way: scheduled Facebook events for the show premieres, so you can plan a time to watch online with other fans on Facebook, no matter where you are in the U.S. The first one is coming on Tuesday for the Season 4 premiere of Heroes. You can also RSVP for upcoming events for other shows, including The Simpsons and 30 Rock, by following the event links from their Hulu: Watch Now app pages. To keep up to date on all of these premiere events, become a Fan of Hulu on Facebook.

Eric Yellin (eric.yellin@hulu.com)
Content Distribution

The most prominent change is cosmetic, as we have moved away from our former two-column grid and have given prominent placement to the show you’re most likely searching for. You can subscribe to the show, check on its availability, and get a brief description of the show, but you can easily pinpoint a specific episode using the browse tools to the upper right of the results. For current shows, such as Better Off Ted or America’s Got Talent, we’ll default the most recent episode; for older shows, like Miami Vice, we’ll highlight the pilot episode (or the first episode we have if the pilot is unavailable). You can browse through the episodes available there, or scroll down the page to check out all the videos that match your search.

Your results can be refined using the filter menus — display only clips or full episodes, or sort by relevance or airdate, for instance — and those of you looking for closed captioning can opt for the “cc only” option, which will call up results with that feature, if any related videos are available.

These changes are carried over to our Most Popular and Recently Added pages. And because we really do listen to your feedback, we’ve modified things so that multiple clips or several episodes from a particular season of a show are now collapsed into a single entry that you can click on to expand. That way, you can easily bypass the videos you’re not interested in, but still easily to delve into the content you do care about, like the latest clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

And finally, from the Time-Based Search page in Hulu Labs, you can also search for videos based on date and then use the Video Type filter to display clips or full episodes only.

Now that you’ve read all about these new features, give them a try and let us know what you think: send your feedback to feedback@hulu.com.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

To help us learn from user feedback even earlier in our development lifecycle, we’re excited to open up a new Hulu Labs section on the site today. At Hulu Labs, we’ll provide sneak peeks at some of the upcoming releases from our product roadmap, some of which are personal projects and hobbies our devs have been cooking up. From new recommendation algorithms to tools for building custom widgets to a time-based view for browsing your favorite shows, we’ll be sharing a variety of these new creations with you at Hulu Labs and looking forward to your thoughts on how to make these products better.

Headlining our Hulu Labs release today is Hulu Desktop, a new downloadable application that allows you to find and enjoy your favorite Hulu videos in a rich, full-screen computer window that you can control with your mouse and keyboard or any six-button PC or Mac remote control. Hulu Desktop was built by a small group on our engineering team (two devs, one designer, one product manager) who asked themselves one day: how can we make it easier for users to immerse themselves in the great shows and movies Hulu is fortunate to have access to? Our answer was to build a new PC and Mac application that gives users the option to step outside of their browser, keyboard and mouse and into something different. We’ve always aspired to provide the best video viewing experience possible on your “lappity-toppity boxes” and make online video more fun to watch. And working together with our media partners, we hope Hulu Desktop is another positive step towards building a legal, long-lasting service that earns us the right to continue serving you.

As with other Hulu Labs projects, Hulu Desktop is still in beta and undergoing changes, but we’re excited to give you this early look and hear what you think. Please share your feedback with us — the good, the bad, and the ugly — anytime on the Hulu Labs discussion board.

Eric (eric.feng@hulu.com)
CTO, Hulu

At Hulu, we’re obsessed with doing everything we can to connect our users with the videos they love. We are relentlessly focused on making it easier to discover, enjoy and share the best premium video, both on and off Hulu.com.

To continue to deliver on our mission to connect audiences with their favorite content wherever they are — or, as Denis Leary would say, on their “bliggety blogs, facey spaces and tweety pages” — we are releasing a new embeddable product this week: the Video Panel widget.

The new Video Panel widgets are customizable and embeddable, and allow you to post an entire series or group of videos to your blog or personal website. (We’ve posted the Advanced Video Panel widget with popular SNL clips above.) You can check out our Widget Gallery here: www.hulu.com/about/distrogallery, or pick up the embed code for a Video Panel widget from the new Widgets tab on any of the show or video pages on Hulu.

For webmasters interested in configuring the Video Panel’s look and feel and the content available (e.g. show, channel, network, keyword, etc.) to their more advanced websites, we also have a new Video Panel designer. To submit a request for access, please click here.

For additional information about Hulu’s distribution products, check out the new Hulu Distribution section of the website at www.hulu.com/distribution.

Pete
Hulu Distribution Team

Notice anything different? We had a little work done to freshen up the Hulu Blog this weekend.

The new design offers easy access to useful links — a video tour of Hulu, discussion boards and ways to follow us on Twitter and Facebook — as well as popular RSS feeds, recent Twitter posts and handy tags that let you find articles based on topic. We’ve streamlined our tagging so that you can easily find all of our interviews with the people involved with your favorite shows and movies, keep track of all of the site features covered in our blog, and review all the annoucements we’ve made in our short history.

Additionally, you can now search for videos directly from our blog pages (use the Hulu search bar at the very top of the page), or browse our selection of video content, including our Channels, Most Popular and Recently Added pages.

So what do you think about new look of the Hulu Blog? Share your thoughts in the comments, and we’ll consider your suggestions next time we make an update.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

First up are search shortcuts. For nearly as long as we’ve been up on the web, we’ve offered auto-complete in the search box for common searches, typically show titles. Those searches have always taken you to our regular search results page and will continue to do so, but we’ve now added some shortcut links as well in our autocomplete list.

Start typing a show title in our search box, and we’ll start to show potential matches as you type, but beneath the most likely show title match, we now offer other quick links depending on the show.

For current shows, we know from studying search navigation behavior and from our own usage of Hulu that many users who type in a show title are simply looking to watch the latest episode, so we’ve added a quick link to current shows takes you directly to the latest episode, saving you from having to navigate to the search results page and then clicking on the latest episode.

For all shows, current or not, we’ve also added a shortcut which reads “go to show page” for those of you who want to visit our overview for that show, including a list of all our episodes and clips, user reviews, discussion forums, show descriptions and cast lists, availability notes, and more. We’ve also added related searches to the autocomplete dropdown, set off below a grey horizontal line. All of these should make our search box a bit more functional and help you get you where you need to go sooner.

With that same goal in mind, we’ve also launched support for a series of search operators for those of you comfortable with formulating more complex and directed queries. For a full list of those, visit our new search tips page. The search operators we’ve added are:

• show
• season
• episode
• type
• date
• site
• people
• title

Most of these operators do what you’d expect them to do based on their name, but a few warrant further explanation. To use any of these search operators, put them in your search query followed directly by a colon and then a value. Use quotation marks to specify multi-word values.

If you employ multiple search operators, we’ll treat it as an “AND” and try to satisfy all of the operators. For example, let’s say you’d like to watch every pilot episode for every TV show on our site. You could type the following search query:

season:1 episode:1 type:episode

Voila — every pilot we index, including those that aren’t streamed directly on Hulu. Until I conducted that search, I didn’t realize just how many we track, over 700 at present.

Let’s say you only wish to see episodes we stream on Hulu.com, though, and you’re curious about which of those pilots aired during the 1990’s, the height of your TV-viewing youth (I’d use the dates from my TV-viewing youth, but I’ve already taken enough of a beating about my age from my youthful coworkers). Take the original query and modify it like so:

season:1 episode:1 type:episode site:hulu date:1990-1999

Let’s shift gears. Suppose you’ve seen every episode of 30 Rock and, blown away by Alec Baldwin’s comedic performance as Jack Donaghy, you decide to dive deep into his Saturday Night Live oeuvre, having never been able to stay up late enough to catch SNL over the years. You could use this search query:

people:”alec baldwin” show:”saturday night live”

By the way, just out of curiosity, I modified the query above to use Kristen Wiig, and the number of results returned was over 4X that of the handful of other popular cast members I thought to try. Let me know if you find an SNL cast member with a larger footprint on the site.

For my last search operator example, let’s say you’re standing at the office water cooler on Monday morning and two of your coworkers are laughing hysterically and asking you if you saw the “I’m on a Boat” video over the weekend. You have no idea what they’re talking about but nod and laugh so as not to seem uncool and pop-culturally oblivious. You have no idea what show they’re referring to, but you’re fairly certain that’s the name of the video (which, by the way, is actually a unique situation as most users have no idea what the titles of TV episodes are, one of the unique issues related to TV video searches). Type this query:

title:”i’m on a boat”

And just like that, you’re on a boat, and you never thought you’d be on a boat. It’s a big, blue watery road.

I’ve only just touched on the types of fun, interesting, and useful searches you can execute using one or more of these search operators, either alone or in conjunction with others. Read over our search tips and try formulating some of your own and you’ll be a Hulu power user in no time.

With all of these search enhancements, we know there will still be times when you may scan the first page of search results and realize you need to reformulate your query. To save you some vertical scrolling, we’ve added a bottom search box to our site and will leave your most recent query in it for quick modification.

If you glance at the bottom search box, next to the Search Tips link, you’ll see a link that reads Search Plugin. If you use a browser that supports OpenSearch, click on that link to add Hulu to your browser’s search box options. Popular browsers that support OpenSearch include Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome.

Give all these enhancements a whirl and let us know what you think.
Even with all of these updates, we recognize that video search is still one of the areas of greatest opportunity for elevating our users’ experience in quantum leaps. We’re still only brushing the surface. Look for many more Hulu search features in the months to come.

Eugene (eugene@hulu.com),
Product Guy

First, videos from Hulu’s HD Gallery are now embeddable, so you can share your favorite HD videos in 720p, directly from your personal blog or Web site. While you’re watching an HD video on Hulu, click on the “Embed” button that appears when you move your mouse over the Hulu video player, then click on “copy to clipboard” to select the video’s embed code from the screen that appears. Paste the code to your site’s publishing program, and then watch in high def directly from your blog or site.

We’re launching this feature with a show that’s new to Hulu, Legend of the Seeker. Coming from the producers of Hercules: The Incredible Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, it’s an action-packed adaptation of Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth books. It tells the adventures of a young man, Richard Cypher, who discovers that he was born a “Seeker” who is destined to wield a mythical sword to defeat an evil tyrant, Darken Rahl. With the help of a mysterious (and attractive) woman named Kahlan and a quirky wizard called Zedd, Richard travels the countryside helping the oppressed stand up to the Darken Rahl’s armies. Shot with the exotic New Zealand landscape as a backdrop, the series has been among our users’ top requests since its November broadcast premiere. The two-part premiere episode is now available — and embeddable — in our HD Gallery; a total of six videos (seven episodes) are available in standard or high res here.

Our other new feature today allows you to rearrange the videos in your queue by simply dragging and dropping them to desired spot. To get started, simply hover your mouse over any video title, press and hold your mouse button, and drag the item up or down in your queue. Move as many videos as you like, and then press the “update order” button to save your changes. You can still rearrange the playback order by renumbering the videos using the input boxes in the “Play Order” column, or using the “move to top” arrows located next to the input boxes. Additionally, you may sort your queue by show title, expiration date or airdate by clicking on the column titles — just remember to press the “update order” button when all of your updates have been made.

Tomorrow Hulu for the Holidays brings three documentaries that are sure to inspire, and maybe even teach you a thing or two. Check back to see what we’ve picked.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

The first feature — a buffer progress bar — is something you’ll notice only if you pause a video during playback. When a video is paused, Hulu loads a small portion of the video into your computer’s memory. The new buffer progress bar allows you to see how much of a video has been stored, and when the bars reach “full,” about five minutes of the video have been loaded. (Due to legal reasons, Hulu currently does not buffer more than a small portion of a video at a given time.) For users who are experiencing choppy playback due to network congestion, this progress bar lets you know when the video has reached its buffering limit so you can hit “play” and enjoy the show.

The second feature we’ve introduced today allows you to watch any Hulu video embedded on any site in full-screen mode. To use this feature from a blog or website with an embedded Hulu video (such as this blog; I’ve embedded the first video blog from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Conan’s future replacement, in today’s post), just start playing the video. When the video begins, move your mouse over the Hulu player and a small button to go full screen will appear in the upper right corner, next to the search bar. Hulu’s keyboard shortcuts — “f” to go full screen, “space” to pause, “escape” to return to normal view — also work in this mode. (Our full-screen feature only works when using a single monitor; the Flash software we use to stream videos doesn’t support full-screen mode with dual monitors.)

Tomorrow, Hulu for the Holidays brings another movie to our lineup. If you’ve been following the Holidays calendar, you’ll recognize the two leads in this selection: they each appeared in films introduced at the end of November. This one’s about a deadly Irish assassin. We’ve got more movies to finish off the work week; check back every day to see the latest. While you’re at it, check out the latest posts from Jimmy Fallon and see what you think of the new kid in late night.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Below the show recommendations, we’ve listed a number of videos that may be of interest to you. If you’ve already seen any of these videos, you can mark that particular video “I’ve seen this,” or, if you’re not interested in the video, there’s a checkbox for that, too. Whenever you update your video preferences, just click the “Refresh Recommendations” button at the top or bottom of each page of results to remove those suggestions from the recommendations list. And if you would like to share your feedback with our team, feel free to email suggestions or questions to ting@hulu.com.

As the Recommendations engine is still in beta, we’re still gathering data and the system’s video suggestions should improve over time. For the best recommendations, it’s best to remain logged into Hulu whenever you visit the site — that way, the system “remembers” which videos you’ve seen on Hulu and won’t recommend episodes you’ve already seen. Give it a try now: Check out the new, still-in-beta Recommendations feature by going to your Hulu profile page and clicking on the “Recommendations (beta)” tab, or by pointing your browser to hulu.com/users/recommendation.

In addition to new recommendations, we’re also launching a feature that many of our users have asked for: A filter that allows you to quickly find closed captioned videos from our Most Popular, Recently Added and Search Results pages. A simple click on the Closed Captioning filter — which appears under “Special Features” at the bottom of the column on the left of these pages — will display only those videos that feature closed captioning, as indicated by the “cc” icon that appears before the video title on these results pages. You can take a look from our Popular Episodes page, where I’ve turn on the Closed Captioning filter. In addition, you can easily identify which episodes of a show have closed captioning from the text-based list view; just look for the “cc” icon that appears between the video title and its run time — see the main show page for Bones for an example. If there’s a mix of captioned and non-captioned videos, you can click on the “cc” header at the top of the list to bring all of the captioned episodes to the top.

We’re committed to building our library of captioned videos over time, so you can expect to see the selection grow over time. To make it easier for you to access captioning, we have a default setting that allows you to turn on closed captions automatically, whenever they’re available. You can find that setting by going to your Hulu profile page and clicking on the Privacy and Settings tab. You’ll find a Closed Captioning setting on the left side of the page; set that to “Yes” to make captions the default.

We’re devoting the rest of the work week to more Hulu for the Holidays movies. Check back tomorrow for a star-powered romantic comedy that’s all about a love-struck woman’s attempt to stop a wedding so she can have the groom for herself.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Search for another actor, and the same thing happens: The results will display thumbnail images that feature the new star — even if both actors appear in the same videos. Here’s what happens when you search for another SNL cast member, Blizzard Man himself, Andy Samberg.

Our search team has focused their efforts on Hulu’s most popular actor queries, but they’ll continue to expand coverage over time. And if you feel like you’re not getting the videos you expected, each of our search pages features a handy feedback form at the bottom of the results.

This is just one way we’ve made it easier to find the specific video you’re looking for on Hulu. A visit to our home page, hulu.com, reveals another way to get to the shows, movies or clips you want more quickly. Our QuickView feature displays video information whenever you hover your mouse over a video thumbnail image, episode title or show name on Hulu. You’ll get specific, video-related information — the video’s title and its duration, air date, rating and average user rating, plus a short description — when your mouse pauses over the video title or thumbnail image; hovering over a show or movie title will provide a QuickView of the series description.

It’s a neat feature that a lot of our users have asked for, and we hope it helps you determine which video is the one you’re after next time you’re browsing the site. For the rest of the week, Hulu for the Holidays will focus on movies with star power. Tomorrow ’s title features Robert Redford behind the camera — and familiar (if you read the tabloids, anyway) face playing a lead role.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Posting the widget to your blog or website is easy. From our Hulu Widgets page, you can copy the Hulu for the Holidays embed code and paste it on your site. The widget refreshes whenever we update our Holidays list, keeping you and your readers on top of the latest. To start watching any of the TV (Mondays) or movies (Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays) that have been posted, simply click on the episode to begin playback at Hulu.com.

Stay posted as we launch more site features every Tuesday throughout the holiday season, and check back tomorrow, when we’ll reveal a feature-length film, the story of a guy who realizes a lifelong dream through hard work and determination.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

Selecting the “Browse” link on the TV page will direct you to a page where you can Browse TV Shows alphabetically by title or network. From there, you’ll find an A-to-Z list of all of our TV shows, from The A-Team to Young Hercules with Ryan Gosling, long before he started in The Notebook. You might even find a few hidden gems in the listings — Doogie Howser, anyone? You can toggle between full episodes and clips by clicking on the appropriate tab at the top of the list.

You can also browse for a particular genre by clicking on any of the Hulu channel options from the filters in the left column, so that the list will show only titles that fall into our Science Fiction channel, for instance. There’s also an option to arrange the list alphabetically by network at the top of the column.

The same Browse feature can also available help you find movies on Hulu. To see all of our movie titles in alphabetical order, click on “Movies” at the top of any page on Hulu (you’ll also find a link in our page footer); once you’re on the Movies page, click on “Browse” in the grey toolbar near the top of the page. Once again, you’ll be directed to an alphabetical list of all of our full-length movie titles. (To find movie clips, click on the grey “Clips” tab on top of the list.) There, you can find everything from 20 Dates to Xanadu.

If you’re the bookmarking type and use these pages often, you can always add these links to your browser bookmarks folder:

TV: http://www.hulu.com/browse/alphabetical/episode

Movies: http://www.hulu.com/browse/alphabetical/feature_film.

Surprised by some of the classics? Share your favorites in the comments section below.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Editor

You can also remove several videos at once. Check off the videos you want to remove, then click on the “remove” button above your queue; the selected videos will be taken out of your queue. If you have a number of expired videos in your queue (we keep those there so you aren’t surprised to see a video’s missing), you can click on the “removed expired videos” button — no need to select the videos — to pull them from your queue in one easy step.

To make managing your queue a little easier, there are two ways to view your list: The default view, with thumbnail images of each video, and a new list view. The difference? The thumbnail view spreads your queue over several pages if necessary, while the list view shows your entire queue (without images) on one page for easy reordering. You can change your view by clicking on the buttons located to the right of side of the page, up near the Subscription Alerts settings.

We’ve also split out our queue alerts so you can opt out of expiration alerts if you’d rather not receive them. When you turn on Subscription Alerts, we’ll send a daily e-mail whenever we add a new video from your subscription list to your queue. Expiration Alerts will notify you when a video in your queue is set to expire in seven days. You can activate these alerts in your Profile under the “Privacy and Settings” or “Queue” tabs.

The check boxes that allow you to remove select items from your queue also let you change your privacy settings from public to private for the selected videos, just in case you want to keep those Bring It On clips to yourself. If you prefer to keep everything private all the time, you can modify your lists’ privacy settings from your Profile’s Privacy and Settings tab. Note: Your settings on the Privacy and Settings tab override any settings you make in your queue, even when your queued videos say “public.”

And finally, we now offer relevant availability messaging at the top of show pages, letting you know when you can expect the latest episode of your favorite series. Take a look at the show page for House, hulu.com/house, for an idea.

If you haven’t already, check out the new Queue settings and let us know what you think at feedback@hulu.com.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com),
Hulu Editor

New Channels

Surfing Hulu is a whole lot easier: Our new, genre-based channels let you explore Hulu videos in a whole new way. Choose your favorite subject and discover all the videos Hulu has to offer. You can get a look at the new channels from our home page — just hover your mouse over the new “Channels” menu near the top of our home page, and an interactive channel list will pop up — or click through to the Channels Page, where you’ll find categories like Anime, featuring the ninjas from Naruto, the deadly notebook from Death Note, and the primeval Mushi-Shi; and Food and Leisure, with recipes from such Food Network shows as Everyday Italian with Giada De Laurentiis and 30 Minute Meals with Rachael Ray. You can browse by video or by show or movie title, and use the filters on the right to sort by most popular, recently added or title.

Discuss Videos with Other Hulu Users

Hulu fans have a lot to say about their favorite shows and movies. To make it easier to share ideas, discuss storylines and get the scoop on your favorite stars, we’ve introduced Hulu discussion boards. You can get started on any show page — a new “Discussions” tab now appears underneath the video player — and start a new thread about Dr. Greene’s upcoming appearance on ER, join in on the discussion about the pseudoscience on Fringe, or debate which Heroes villain has best superpower.

In addition to video discussions, we’ve launched a forum for general discussions about all things Hulu: the Hulu Discussion Boards, where you can share your suggestions, request a new show, or leave feedback for our team. In addition, a search feature allows you to search for discussion topics based on keyword.

Channels and discussion boards are just two of the site improvements. Click around the site and see what else is new; we’ll announce other new features this week.

Enjoy,

Rebecca

rebecca.harper@hulu.com

Hulu Editor

One setting is for Closed Captioning and it allows you to set the Hulu player to always turn on English captions when available. The second setting allows you to instruct the Hulu player to always default to the hi-res (1Mbps, 480p) stream if available for any video.

These are both in addition to the two settings that remain from before. One opts you in to receive the occasional (and by occasional, we mean rare) e-mail from us when we have exciting news or site features to share. The second activates queue updates. These short text e-mails let you know if we’ve added a video from any of your subscriptions to your queue. We also will send a short e-mail if any of the videos in your queue are expiring soon so you have a chance to view them. These queue update e-mails are batched and sent at most once a day, and only when there’s relevant activity to share.

You’ll need a Hulu account to access and adjust these settings. If you haven’t signed up for a Hulu account, it’s free and quick.

Enjoy,

Eugene (eugene.wei@hulu.com)

The Hulu Player Widget allows you to watch a variety of videos from the widget itself. Embeddable on your desktop, blog and personal home page, you can play videos from your queue or Hulu’s featured, most popular or recently added lists, or you can find other shows, movies or clips on Hulu and other sites using the search bar within the widget.

To give the widget a try on your blog, iGoogle page, desktop or other platforms, you can grab it from our Widget Gallery or from the video player we’ve installed below. Just click on “Preferences” in the lower right, then click on “grab” to add the widget to a number of platforms, or click on “embed” to copy the embed code to your blog.

In addition to the Player Widget, our Widget Gallery features three other widgets: the Summer Widget, which helps you track the additions to our Hulu Days of Summer lineup; the Show Widget, which links you to the latest updates to your favorite shows or movie; and the Picks Widget, which connects you to the day’s most popular, highest rated and recently added videos on Hulu. If you like to keep an eye on our recently added and most popular lists, the Picks Widget (below) is the widget for you.

These smaller widgets don’t offer the ability to watch or search for videos from within the widgets, but you can click through to start the video in a new browser window. You can change the view from the settings menu on the lower right corner, and choose whether to show episodes, clips or both, at any time. Give them a try and let us know what you think here in the comments section, or at feedback@hulu.com.

Stas (stanislav.nikiforov@hulu.com),
Hulu’s Waterloo Wonder